NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this image of Saturn’s atmosphere alive with a multitude of dark vortices swirling through its southern hemisphere.
Scientists have learned that vortices are long-lived features on Saturn, part of the general circulation of the giant planet’s atmosphere. Vortices are thought to be caused by the shear between eastward- and westward-flowing jets — the alternating bands flowing past each other in the atmosphere.
The vortices can last for months or years and probably grow by merging with other vortices until a few dominate a particular zone of wind shear between two jets.
The vortex at upper right is one of the largest seen on Saturn. Cassini took the image on Feb. 16 with its narrow-angle camera, at a distance of approximately 3.2 million kilometers (2 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 19 kilometers (12 miles) per pixel.
